Professional women question workplace choices

Elizabeth Perle McKenna's recent book is a punchy read, offering insight into the trade-offs and consequences of pursuing traditional measures of success. It's relevant reading for men as well as for women.

Elizabeth McKenna quit her senior management position in a top publishing house. By all external measures, she'd "made it". But the satisfaction and pleasure she gained from her work and her work environment had steadily eroded. Her decision to resign followed long months of anxiety and fear about her future and questioning about who she was if not a top editor.

When work doesn't work anymore: women, work and identity was written after Elizabeth McKenna quit her job. She set up a study at home and spent a year researching the experiences of other women who, like her, had walked away from the managerial positions they had spent their adult lives pursuing.

This research tells the story of a particular cohort of women: those baby-boomers who were the first generation of women to enter the workforce in significant numbers. But the observations and lessons are also important for men and a younger generation entering the workforce.

These women brought into the workplace not only their university degrees but new sets of expectations. "We knew what success looked like," writes Elizabeth McKenna. "We had to get married like our mothers and have careers like our fathers". Such women defined success in terms more broad than either of their parents. They were the superwomen of the 70s and 80s; juggling challenging, meaningful and well-paid careers with a beautiful home, smiling children and tanned husbands. As they hit their late 30s and early 40s, these women struggled with questions of parenthood and family, while around them the workplace changed dramatically.

Superwoman was always a myth. No amount of time-management skills can balance all the ingredients baby-boomer women were told were necessary for a completely successful life. Only after careers were well-established did some women begin to recognise the glass ceiling they were trapped underneath. In Australia, women are still paid only 79 per cent of the average male wage and are under-represented in managerial and executive positions. Only 4 per cent of board members and a mere 1 per cent of executive directors in Australia are women. Those percentages have remained static for the past five years.

Trade-offs and compromises

Meanwhile, writes Elizabeth McKenna, many women got a certain point in their careers, only to find that the rules had changed. "Instead of the security we saw our fathers having, we started to be afraid of being fired for the first time in our careers. Not because we weren't good at our jobs but because some company bought us, or we were merged, or made redundant for cost-cutting measures. Just as we got to a point where we could enjoy the fruits of all our hard work, corporations became less generous. The paternalism that once offered a feeling of being taken care of was done in by squeezed profit margins... We began working to keep the work, not for the love of it."

Despite entering the workforce in significant numbers, and into previously exclusively male domains, this generation of women largely adapted to the prevalent workplace culture. As Elizabeth McKenna dryly comments, "A funny thing happened on the way to the office. Rather than changing the culture we entered, we seem to have accommodated it. Or, we just resigned ourselves to it. A first this seems like simple dues paying. What choice is there? You can't change it. You're either a player or you aren't. If you want to be one, you have to play the game on their terms.

"Every woman entering the business world soon finds that, contrary to her academic experience, how well she performs is only one factor in creating a future for herself. Instead, an unwritten set of rules directs her fate — a Darwinian system that weeds out those with no stomach for politics, competition or mono-focused ambition."

A "real job"

Some women — particularly but not exclusively those with children — looked for new solutions to managing work and other responsibilities or interests. Some were grateful to find the companies they worked for would permit them to work part-time. Quickly dubbed the "Mommy track" in the US, awareness dawned quickly that such work was dead-end and less senior than previous full-time jobs. They were no longer contenders for promotion or interesting, challenging assignments.

The most interesting part of Elizabeth McKenna's book is her exploration of why women like herself — middle class, educated, capable and ambitious — find it so difficult to walk away from working environments they find increasingly unsatisfactory. There are salient lessons here too, for a younger generation of working women.

"I really believed," writes Elizabeth McKenna, "that if I worked hard enough, I would never ever fail." This group of women can be defined as much by their expectations of themselves as by the success they have achieved. Their identities — just as men's have long been — are defined by the job they do, the corporation they work for, the contribution they make in the paid workplace. Having spent 20 years of one's life unquestioning pursuing the grail of corporate success, to accept that "work doesn't work for you anymore" is to peer over into an abyss."

It involves, says Elizabeth McKenna, "taking stock of where we are, what we like about it and what we don't. It means we have to be ready to switch from the accepted system of recognisable success to something more individually rewarding. ...To make this enormous shift takes courage and usually lots of misery."

Negotiating a new contract

When successful, highly skilled women weigh up their choices and the consequences, running their own businesses seems to be looking highly attractive. In the US, 25 per cent of employees work for a woman-owned and managed business. This path provides women with an opportunity to create a work environment and culture that works for them.

The sacrifices demanded by new ventures almost guarantee executives will take a big drop in pay. A career change may also result in less status, as perceived from a corporate viewpoint. But the satisfaction gained from integrating work into the rest of your life appears to more than compensate.

Senior women executives' dissatisfaction with the rules and uneven rewards of corporate life come as no surprise to many men, who may also find such environments soulless and frustrating. As more women question the status quo, it should be easier for men to take alternative career paths too. Yet the gender stereotypes which sniff that women "can't cut it" in senior positions exact a high price on those men who defy convention. The dilemma will only worsen as two-career couples become the norm if businesses don't adapt by providing more flexible working environments.

Australian executive, father and now author Daniel Petrie, makes a blunt assessment about corporate structures in his recent book Father Time. "Through the last 50 or so years we (men) have created business infrastructures that are basically anti-children, anti-family, anti-spouse, anti-community and anti-anything approaching social responsibility. These infrastructures are pro-profit. This is seen as the ultimate excuse."

Elizabeth McKenna's message is ultimately hopeful. She identifies a marked change in the attitudes of a younger generation entering the workforce, the "Gen Xers" who have absorbed the new contracts of the workplace. Using one of her interviewees as an example — a young woman about to graduate from university — Elizabeth McKenna writes: "She's more concerned about having a job that's meaningful than one that's powerful. What she's looking forward to isn't so different from what I wanted at her age — independence, challenge, freedom, love and contribution. But I think she knows something about these things that I didn't then — that they can come from many different places and along many different paths."

Reviewed by Rachel Rose